Fargo

We awoke to a hazy sunrise over Lake Superior on Monday morning, partly due to the poor air quality due to smoke from Canadian forest fires.  We also awoke to a Mini Cooper covered in fine, white debris of some kind, which I thought might be ash until somebody at the hotel explained that it came from tiny winged insects from the lake shedding their skin.

By mid-morning we had crossed into Minnesota.  We were already on Central Time, and in a day or two we would be on Mountain Time.  There is a real sense of traveling long distances when you start crossing time zones!  Almost a smaller version of "jet lag."

We were in Garrison Keillor country now, and we wondered if the fictitious Lake Wobegon might be nearby.  Our picnic stop for the day – we were able to find interesting picnic tables most days for a light midday lunch – was behind a church along the road equipped with a few tables and a playground.  I think it was a Lutheran church, which we had been seeing in this part of the country, but it could very well have been Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility.  There were neat little farms everywhere, which looked as if they were carefully tended by Norwegian bachelor farmers.

We were joined way out in this unpopulated part of Minnesota by another person, a cultivated British woman’s voice from our GPS.  I use Google Maps to navigate, which despite its quirks has done a good job getting us across the country, and several months ago I tried to set the voice to a British one, just because I like the way British people talk.  All of my attempts failed, but for some unknown reason, when least expected but especially when we were far away from cell signals, a posh-sounding British voice would suddenly replace the usual American woman.  “In hahlf a mile, turn right,” she will suddenly announce.  Sometimes both voices will alternate with one another.  It's a mystery.

 

We crossed the Mississippi River and were surprised how narrow it was up here in Minnesota.  And we again encountered more strange names for towns:  Nimrod, Wadena.  But despite what some might call the monotonous stretches of road, we were never at a loss for conversation (about names like Nimrod if nothing else), although we did not mind riding in comfortable silence mile after mile., simply absorbing the scenery.

We tried to fuel up the Mini every day before arriving at our destination so we would not have to worry about it on long sections of road way out in the country, but we were discovering that the 93 octane premium gasoline recommended for a Mini Cooper was nonexistent in Minnesota and many other western states.  The best we could do was 91 octane, which I told Martha was like “box wine.”

 

We arrived in the downtown area of Fargo mid-afternoon.  The city was named after William G. Fargo, who together with Henry Wells founded Wells-Fargo, which I remember as being the name on most stagecoaches in Westerns that I watched growing up, often the victim of masked outlaws on horseback.  The other reason I knew the city’s name is from the Coen Brothers movie of the same name, in which the pivotal scene features a murderer grinding up Steve Buscemi’s body parts in a wood-chipper.  I discovered that tourists can visit a replica of the famous “Eager Beaver” wood-chipper at the nearby Visitors Center, complete with a mannequin’s leg gruesomely protruding, and it is apparently a big hit.

 

Instead of the wood-chipper, we opted to visit a mural in the downtown area (led unerringly by the address in our GPS) depicting one of our favorite musicians (and Nobel Laureate), Bob Dylan. 

 

The mural was impressively tall, and I liked the casual way Dylan seems to be leaning against the wall, cigarette in hand and the pages of song lyrics clutched in his hands.  The artist was Jules Muck, who has painted about 10,000 murals in the U.S. over the past 30 years.  Muck says she was asked to paint the mural by the owner of a new shop in Fargo and wanted to commemorate the time when Bob Dylan lived in the area.  I thought of that early-Dylan song on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which I think was the first album of his that I bought and which I played incessantly at the time:
 

If you're travelin' in the north country fair

Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

Remember me to one who lives there

Oh she once was a true love of mine.

 

We had parked to take a photo of the mural and decided to look for a place to eat dinner nearby, despite the early hour (our stomachs were still on Eastern time).  Just down the street was a place called Cowboy Jack’s and the menu posted outside looked good.  A couple was just entering and we asked if it was good.  “Oh, it’s great,” they said.  “And you have to eat upstairs.”  And that’s what we did, out on a rooftop overlooking the city, in the north country fair.